Category: User Groups

I’ve had the opportunity to work with some fantastic clients and projects over the years, but one stand out client in my career would be SA Water. A South Australian Water Utility company, responsible for delivering water services to some 1.5 million people who live in the state of South Australia as well as businesses.

SA Water had a long term vision of what they wanted to do, being slightly behind other utilities in terms of electronic billing and customer centric design, SA Water digital transformation team had a clear approach and roadmap that would enable them to leap frog other utilities by strategically betting on future technologies. Bots, Field Service Management are prime examples.

The technology stack, centered around the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 (presently being upgraded to Dynamics 365) that would enable customer centric and relationship management features. Together with an ADX Studio Portal to deliver online services. The process and analysis was performed through a Human Centred Design (HCD) approach, that emphasized with their customers by understanding their frustrations and wishes.

And with that, a project was born to launch the mySAWater Portal that would set the bed rock foundation for future transformative projects at the utility.

Toby Evans, SA Water’s Digital Transformation Manager, presented the mySAWater solution and talks more in-depth about the vision, roadmap, technology, and what considerations were made during the time. Here’s the full presentation.

Dynamics 365 User Group (Adelaide, Australia Chapter) – Marcus D’Assumpcao from Microsoft introduces the audience to Seeing AI. Seeing AI is an app developed by Microsoft to aimed at helping the visually impaired to recognise objects and their surroundings through the help of Microsoft AI technology.

Join us tomorrow at the D365UG where Sam Fernando (ASG) will present on how Azure logic apps and Microsoft Flow can empower you to get more work done!

Also nothing’s better than hearing it from the customers. This month we are also hosting a ‘Customer Voice’ session. Toby Evan’s from SA Water will present on newly launched ‘mySAWater – Customer self-help portal’.

He will also share his experience on the journey and how Dynamics CRM helped and transformed SA Water to become more customer centric.“

Did you know that 70% of Australia’s GDP comes from the Services industry? But scarily in Australia, 23% of employees leave a job within the first 12 months. And many reports show that the average cost of employee turnover is equivalent to a year’s wage. So it goes without saying that Employees are our most valuable asset, and managing them well is critical to your organisation’s success, your quality of service, and our countries future.

Cognitive Computing is being used all around you, and you probably don’t even know it. Facebook is listening to your conversations and showing you advertisements based on the words you use and the emotions you show. Facebook auto-tags people in photos based on facial recognition. Call centres are recording conversations and determining sentiment en-mass (ideally to provide you a better service ). Casinos are watching you walk in and matching you against criminal databases.

Microsoft is investing heavily in this space also:

”Microsoft Cognitive Services let you build apps with powerful algorithms to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret our needs using natural methods of communication, with just a few lines of code. Easily add intelligent features, such as emotion and sentiment detection, vision and speech recognition, language understanding, knowledge and search, into your app, across devices and platforms, such as iOS, Android and Windows, keep improving and are easy to set up.”